God is on the move in Champaign! Hopefully if you’ve read more than one of these updates you’ll know that Bridge Church Exists to make the real Jesus impossible to ignore in Champaign and beyond. Over the last couple of months we’ve seen concrete evidence that this is happening!

We’re seeing slow and steady growth on Sunday morning. I try not to pay too much attention to numbers, but even I can tell the difference between fifty people and thirty people. It’s encouraging that our ‘down,’ Sundays number about what our average Sundays would have been a year or so ago. This is slow growth, but it is steady, healthy and sustainable.

Our giving numbers are going up. We’ve had a really strong first quarter of giving at Bridge Church. This allows us to plan to become self-supporting more quickly, it allows us to dream about moving into our own building sooner, and it allows us to strengthen our relationships with local non-profits that we support. Money, of course, isn’t everything, but it’s probably the most reliable metric there is of where people’s commitments and priorities are.

But most exciting is the intangible aspects of our church life together. The ‘spirit,’ of our meeting together. The number of people making new friendships and lingering after service on Sunday. The climbing attendance at our midweek and Saturday Bible studies. Even the volume of our sung worship. As with the Christian life, so with church planting, so much of what’s most important is what’s invisible. 

Please keep us in your prayers. Pray that we would keep the main thing the main thing, that we would be more and more overwhelmed by the love of God in Jesus Christ, and that He would be impossible to ignore in our hearts, and therefore in our church and eventually in our city.